John,
Could you give the SVN>=r5949 a try ? That fixes one of the problems you were
describing in a previous email:
r2[0].date.year
The reason why it didn't work before was that a masked array was
systematically returned in __getattribute__. Now, you'll get a masked array
if the output has a shape (ie, not a single record), or if it's a single
record with some mask fields.
Note that I'm not guaranteeing that you won't run into some problems again at
one point or another...